That James Cameron Thing

The next phase of our adventure is to mentally review all 248 pages of Stockman’s, ‘How to Shoot Video That Doesn’t Suck?’ We need a video plan. The ‘video plan’ is a step in my approach to recording that I am just now starting to consider before I get in the car with my gear.

I think there are four basic types of movies; or a combination of the four.

1. Play-purposeless, 2. Art (including Beauty, Impact /emotion, and Exploration such as the color red or the wind), 3. Documentation which is to record reality such as Inform, Chronologically capture an event or phenomenon. The 4th type of movie would be to tell a story: manufactured and edited. 

 

Hopefully, your epic flick includes all four of these fundamentals.

 

For me, much of the last nine months of taking Tommy, my Phantom 2, on video adventures has been pretty much, ‘I wonder if I can keep this thing in the air and get some good vids’. I haven’t really thought much about what the finished movie is really about. That changed when I decided to capture the beauty of the rough California Coast a while back.

For this undertaking, I had to dig down and see in my mind's eye what that final video should look like to viewers. With a clear (well, almost clear) vision of the expected outcome I headed to the cliff.

At that point I needed to decide what flight paths would result in captivating video. Where is the sun? What routes will I fly? Where am I going to take off and land from? When should I fly FPV and what parts of the intended flight path should I not be under the googles. What should my spotter be looking for when I am under the goggles? Review the CHECKLIST a final time.

Speaking of compelling videos and capturing captivating scenes, I have taken some really crappy videos. Though I have usually had kinda a vision in my mind as to what want to capture from what I see in front of me. Unfortunately, the results have been about a quart low on Nirvana. The most disheartening failure is pulling that mini SD card out of the GoPro and inserting it into the computer. Nothing. Not one frigging file. Why? Yep, I never pressed the GoPro record button. (Remember that checklist thing I have mentioned too many times? You get the point.)

Note: I have had occasions where upon landing, my seemingly perfect recording session resulted in a ‘SD card error’. If you are using a GoPro, format your SD card in your camera and not with your computer.

Here is an example of a 'story' https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YP_xc0rbl6w